301–310 of 563 posts
And I am sure there are other "Bay Bridges" in the world too.
GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…
GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". Yacc stands for "Yet Another C Compiler". Nano was originally TIP which stood for "TIP Isn't Pico" but was later changed to Nano so as not to conflict with another Unix utility called tip [0]. Presumably nano was chosen as the metric prefix next larger than pico. Personally, I'd prefer choosing a random string of 3-8 letters for command line tools. At least that would be better than n…
To be clear: I didn't mean to imply this is a bad thing.
GNU's Not Unix, Pine Is Not Elm, TIP Isn't Pico all share one important characteristic — their audience is expected to know what Unix, Elm, Pico are, and saying "X is not Y" implies "X is specifically, deliberately an alternative to Y, in the same style as Y".
If you know what GNU and YACC are, you probably don't need to be told twice that "Bison" is GNU's YACC implementation — the pun makes it instantly memorable.
One of my personal favourites is Ubuntu's version naming scheme. The "alliterative animal" form is highly memorable, and gives you two different words to latch on to, either of which is enough to uniquely identify a version. The fact they're alphabetical also makes it easy to check which version is newer (Letter collisions happen on a 13-year cycle, which makes it highly unlikely to be a source of confusion).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even GNU is a recursive acronym, Emacs a convoluted one... What's Perl, Python, Java... all about? Remember how JavaScript was named? Don't mention Go (go-lang) or Pascal... Git, Mercurial, CVS anyone? I believe this makes much ado about nothing.
"Concurrent Versions/Versioning System" is a pretty reasonable one, though.
Or Gtk even: Gnu-is-not-Unix Image Manipulation Program ToolKit (later changed to refer to Gnome instead of Gimp I believe).
GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…
> I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. Data(set) Definition. But that name does not make any sense whatsoever by itself in this context, neither for the tool (it hardly "defines" anything), nor for UNIX in general (there are no "datasets" in UNIX). Instead, it's specifically a reference to the DD statement in the JCL, the job control language, of many of IBM's mainframe operating systems of yore…
> “But memorable names help with marketing!” > Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does. —— It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just an…
The cognitive tax is a real problem. Using random cutesy names, there is no obvious behavior boundary. Does authentication go in the SnufBux module? Or the Farfrumstable service? Who knows? Without obvious language clues to handle a new concept, any new functionality will get strewn across these internal boundaries. And why not - they have zero semantic meaning anyway! Sloppy names encourage sloppy programming.
GNU's version of Yacc is called Bison. Pine Is Not Elm (even though that was never an official acronym). UNIX was UNICS which was a pun on MULTICS. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what dd stands for. nano is a copy of pico which was the "PIne COmposer". Postfix is a completely opaque portmanteau of post (as in mail) and "bug fix". C++ is "C incremented", and C is the successor of B, which is the successor of B…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having come from the DOS world (or it could have been Norton utilities), I always thought it was more like DiskDupe (duplicate disks). Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".
"disk dump" is another common (but wrong) guess.
it stands for 'Copy and Convert' and was renamed to `dd` only because `cc` was reserved for the C compiler!